Microsoft Bing Beats Baidu In China

Microsoft’s investments in Bing and its new artificial intelligence (AI)-based features are beginning to pay off. More than 35 percent of users use the Redmond-based search engine on desktop platforms in China. The mobile race to catch up is still pending.

In the Chinese region, a change in the power of search engines is on the horizon, at least on PCs and notebooks. A sustained downward trend of the former market leader Baidu and the crash of Sogou allowed Microsoft to take the lead with Bing. From March to April 2023, the Redmond company’s market share rose from 25.87 to 36.14 percent, according to Statcounter‘s analysis (via Gizmochina).

Bing: Positive tablet trend, stagnation on smartphones

A similar trend is foreseeable in the tablet area. Here, Microsoft’s Bing is already in second place behind Baidu, which is also stumbling with its mobile offshoot. Bing, on the other hand, has a hard time with smartphones. Yandex is the big gainer here in April, while Microsoft is only slightly up from 3.87 to 5.09 percent.

Across all platforms, Bing’s market share is 17.85 percent, still a long way behind Baidu (approx. 39.6 percent) and just behind Yandex (19.4 percent). Google, on the other hand, is hardly relevant in China at around 4 percent.

Bing’s success in China is mainly due to the deep integration of the search engine into a large number of Microsoft products. The integration with the areas of Windows, Office, and Xbox and the parallel introduction of the AI ​​chatbot based on OpenAI ChatGPT-4 seem to attract enormous attention in Asia.

The situation in Germany and America

What about Microsoft’s home market and Germany? Google is clearly the top dog here. From March to April, Bing’s market share in North America (USA and Canada) even decreased to just 5.86 percent. Competitor Google, on the other hand, is stable at 84.8 percent. A similar picture emerges in Germany: Bing, with a market share of 5.1 percent, ranks second behind Google (88.5 percent).

Globally, across all national borders, there is an equally clear picture of Google (81+ percent) and Bing (2.59 percent). It, therefore, remains to be seen whether the integration with Office and Windows products and the integration of artificial intelligence will bear fruit.